André Gide (1869–1951,) fully André Paul Guillaume Gide, was a French novelist, writer, and diarist. This winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature is generally regarded as one of France’s most celebrated novelists.
Born to a middle-class Protestant family in Paris, Gide published his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter (1891,) at age 22. In 1893 and 1894, Gide journeyed to Northern Africa, where he became very ill and narrowly escaped death. This decisive event led him to question his puritanical upbringing. It formed the basis for a pair of his renowned psychological novels, The Immoralist (1902,) about pleasure-seeking and yearning for new experiences, and Strait is the Gate (1909,) about the complexities of adolescence, love, asceticism, and sacrifice.
Gide published several semi-autobiographical narratives, essays, and memoirs. His works are characterized by the tensions in his life, viz., conflict and compromise between a sense of social moralities and individuality and the need for acceptance despite his controversial personal life and beliefs. In another famous novel, The Counterfeiters (1926,) Gide exposed the hypocrisy of insincere people. He also served as a literary critic and translated William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
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Prejudices are the props of civilization.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Prejudice
Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing
The only real education comes from what goes counter to you.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Education
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Writing
The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Logic
Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Mankind, Man
One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Acceptance
Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother’s breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. … Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Humanity
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Conversation
The most decisive actions of our life — I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future — are, more often than not, unconsidered.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Intuition
Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling.
—Andre Gide
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Hypocrisy
Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Sin
Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always find an inhabitant.
—Andre Gide
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves—in finding themselves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Adventure
Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?
—Andre Gide
Topics: Understanding
It is good to follow one’s own bent, so long as it leads upward.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Purpose
We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Being Ourselves
Before I explain my book to others, I expect them to explain it to me. To claim to explain it first is to immediately narrow down its reach; for if we know what we intended to say, we do not know whether we said only that. – One always says more than THAT. – And what interests me most is what I put in without knowing, – that unconscious share, which I would like to call God’s share.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing
Sadness is a state of sin.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Unhappiness, Happiness
Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Gratitude, Appreciation, Acceptance, Blessings
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Madness, Literature, Authors & Writing
There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
“Know thyself” – a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to “know himself” would never become a butterfly.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Knowledge, Self-Discovery
God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
—Andre Gide
Topics: God
The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Reading
Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age
—Andre Gide
Topics: Youth
Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Dying, Death
Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
All these books have lived together … inside my mind. They follow one another only on paper and because of an utter impossibility to let themselves be all written at the same time. Whatever book I write, I never devote myself to it completely, and the matter which most insistently requires me soon later develops, however, at the other end of me.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing
Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Truth
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
—Andre Gide
The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Intelligence
There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.
—Andre Gide
The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Paradise
It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it; but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached at an angle.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Perseverance, Ideas
It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing other good, decent fellows like himself, his gun would fall from his hands
—Andre Gide
One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything, and consequently get nothing.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Goals, Focus, Aspirations
Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Aptness, Appropriateness
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